Slashdot Mirror
10 Tech Concepts You Should Know for 2007
mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new list of wide-ranging technology terms it claims will be big in 2007. From PRAM to BAN and SmartPills to data clouds, it's a pretty nice summary of upcoming and in-the-works trends across the board (with a podcast embedded). Though these aren't technologies they expect to be in everyone's homes next year, they're sure this tech will be in the headlines. How do their predictions from a year ago stack up now?" From the article: "Printed Solar Panels - Tomorrow's solar panels may not need to be produced in high-vacuum conditions in billion-dollar fabrication facilities. If California-based Nanosolar has its way, plants will use a nanostructured "ink" to form semiconductors, which would be printed on flexible sheets. Nanosolar is currently building a plant that will print 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells annually--more than triple the current solar output of the entire country."
I tripled the size of my Body Area Network using the Twinkie Expansion Method so I could have enough bandwidth to access my whole personal Data Cloud.
Now my bed is made of Bendable Concrete and my girlfriend has left me, complaining about my Plasma Arc Gasification.
Now who is going to mend my Printed Solar Panel shirts?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
For example:
l ights/performance.htm
"Pedestrian Protection System (PPS)
Radar sensors and computer-controlled braking will keep drivers safer than ever, but what about pedestrians? In case your adaptive cruise control fails to spot someone darting into the road, TRW Automotive is introducing the PPS system: if you smack a pedestrian, the hood is automatically raised to cushion his landing on the engine block. The system is already being tested, part of a drive to meet new European and Japanese regulations on pedestrian safety which are being phased in, starting with 2006 models."
Jaguar's new XK coupe has this: http://www.jaguarusa.com/us/en/xk/highlights/high
Not to mention FTTH (via Verizon), Perpendicular Storage (via Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Mobile WiMAX (Rogers and Bell in Canada have this).
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Even if they make theoretically impossible 100% efficient solar panel. That's not enough for me to buy a solar panel.
.. you can bet I'll be off grid. I don't care about efficiency, I only care about cost.
.. but if you think about it .. the sides of the square are only 3 meters wide versus the 1 meter wide sides of the 100% efficiency panels. That's not a huge land area to sacrifice.
However, if they can make a 5% efficient solar panel. I will buy it.
Why? It all comes down to cost. Solar power is too expensive for me. It takes over 5 years for a solar panel to pay for itself. Also, a solar panel only lasts (the efficiency declines over time) about 20 years. The capital cost is too high.
So companies should focus on reducing the per watt cost of solar panels. Not on improving the efficiency. If you can make solar panels for $5 per 100 watt panel
A 100% efficiency solar panel can take up 1 m^2 and generate a kilowatt, a 10% efficiency solar panel would need 10 m^2 to match that up
Data Cloud is a silly name for online file storage, but it is something that will be exceedingly useful. There are files storage services now, but many of them charge ten times what it would cost to back up your files locally. The innovation is that these services will finally become cheap and/or free, even for data in the hundreds of GB.
This gives you countless advantages: You can get away without buying extra drives and implementing RAID. You are protected against fire, theft, and (possibly) accidental deletions. You don't have to open up an FTP channel on your local router. You aren't required to have a static IP for your home machine, and you don't have to always keep it running. You can take apart your local machine, rebuild it, and move things around without worrying about your files. You can backup things which were previously impractical to back up, such as ripping your entire DVD collection and storing it without extra compression. Sounds pretty darn good to me.
Thats the equivalent of powering 1.3 Libraries of Congress. Or a string of AA batteries that would wrap around the library of congress 3 times!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I should just ignore the ones for 2007.
damaged by dogma
This way your dealer doesn't need to stock a variety of substances. You pop a pill, when it goes in, it connects with your system, and figures out what you really need to feel good, and then provides it.
What exactly is the business model of giving people unlimited free storage? Hard disks cost money, bandwidth costs money, and most people block ads anyway, so where is the profit? I find it difficult to believe that a company can run a business like that, with the exception of those companies, like Google, who can run it at a loss and support that loss with some other line of revenue. I suppose the service would have some prestige points, but I really see no way to make money that way.
I just did a backup of my laptop. It took 6 single-layer DVDs, which were nearly full. At 20KB/s upstream, which is about what I get (and yes that's kilobytes not bits), that's a minimum of 17 days of continuous uploading, and that's assuming Comcast doesn't shut me down first.
Consumer bandwidth is the problem for those services, really.
The problem with the whole "Data Cloud" thing is that the network bandwidth just isn't there yet. I get impatient enough waiting for my files from my LOCAL hard drive (which has a peak transfer of around a gigabit per second) and yet the best broadband access you can get at the moment is lucky to exceed ten megabits peak transfer (and forget sustained). It's the same issue with network backups - you just can't transfer the terabyte of information I have on my home machine to anywhere on the internet fast enough for it to be called anything even approaching useful. I'll just keep the RAID setup for now, thanks.
Sorry, but I've been hearing about the wonders of storing all my data on some network drive for a long time now, but the storage requirements of "all my data" have been growing faster than the network bandwidth has. Until that trend is reversed, local storage is here to stay.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
How many times do I have to tell you people? Hogsheads!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
So, while the US is facing terrorism that we fund ourselves via our addiction to foreign oil, the president is going on and on about switchgrass, and the entire world may be facing declining oil production while demand continues to increas, technologies that turn trash into power, cheaper solar pannels, and more secure passports will have a LOW impact? At the same time TV and file sharing over the internet, both problems we already have perfectly good solutions for (Cable, Satellite, movie rental stors, Netflicks, HTTP/FTP protocols) will have a HIGH impact? Something just doesn't add up.
I work at a hospital, and I'll vouch that we're already investigating body area networks. Patient monitoring, obviously, is the big one; but we're also very interested in the cost savings of a good RFID sponge count system. After each surgery procedure, some poor shlep has to count through all the sponges and make sure that the count matches up with the number used. And if we're short a sponge or two, then we have to take an x-ray of that patient to see if something was left inside of them. And if something *was*, well, obviously it needs to be removed, necessitating more surgery, and another sponge count.... We're hoping that RFID/wireless chips are going to solve this problem. Also coming down the research pipe, as I understand, are a variety of wireless enabled surgical robots that can crawl the stomach and intestines and do various repair work, and RFID/wireless enabled aneurysm clips and pacemakers to warn against putting patients into MRI fields. Obviously, all vital sign monitoring equipment is getting ready to be put on the networks, which is going to be huge, especially with our associated nursing homes and the aging baby boomer population.
Even if solar becomes cheap enough, what will prevent me is my home owners association. They don't allow solar panels. Move to a neighborhood that doesn't have that rule? I would have to move to a neighborhood that doesn't have a home owners association. Yeah, good luck in finding one! Folks are so afraid of their property values being hurt, they turn into housing fascists.
Yes, this is a real problem. However, if cells become reasonably priced, and can be "printed", what would it take to "print" them onto an attractive subsurface so that it blends in nicely?
And, lest you think this is a NEW idea, an "I'm feeling lucky" Google search led me to somebody else who already had the same idea.
More expensive? Sure! Why else would they go to the extra effort? But it's at least POSSIBLE.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Pretty neat things though.. but I don't envy those who 'recover' the pills after theyve passed through someone. I don't imagine these are "recovered", but can you imagine the conversation in the doctors office when presented with one of these?
Doctor: Well sir, you have 2 options.
Doctor: We can give you this brand new SmartPill for $500
Doctor: or you can take this recycled SmartPill we just "recovered" from an elderly gentleman with chronic diarrhea for $7.50
Patient: uh...I'll take the new one, thanks.
Large user created data: photos and home movies.
A high percentage of people will have high resolution digital photos. Some users will have digital camcorders. A few will have 300 hours of their kids filmed on HD digital camcorders, which would be terabytes of data.
And practically, there is a need to back up one's CDs and DVDs, since if something happens to them, there's no other way to get them back short of repurchasing.
I didn't see anything on the 2006 list that became a buzzword in 2006 - maybe they will in 2007, who knows.
I dunno, Ajax was on that list, and it became pretty big.
Derive Politics
Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.20/gig transferred, $.15/gig stored... I believe). There is no minimum or fixed start-up costs and you only pay for what you use. This is much cheaper to startup than buying HDs for performance-insensitive large blobs of data, since you don't have to pay for power supply, case, drives, motherboards, cpu, memory or ongoing electrical costs. It's also a 100% quieter than running an extra storage server in your apartment. Sure, you can't stream HD video off of this thing, but it definitely has its uses.
Last month I backed up all my important financial and other data completely encrypted and lot more secure than I could have doen it locally. I conveniently mapped S3 to a drive letter on my local system so most programs can access it without even knowing what's going on. I mapped my Roboform password data to the drive, so I can access the same set of data files from multiple places without having to remember to always carry along a USB key. I even tried storing my Firefox profile there... though it technically worked, the problem is that Firefox accesses like a hundred files every time it starts up, and file access latency was too high to make this workable. What you use it for is really left up to your imagination. Anyway, all told, it cost me $.12 for the month.
You need three things to make this work for you:
1. An amazon S3 account
2. An online storage client that supports S3 (I use the free Jungledisk program, but there are several free clients available for Win/Mac/Linux)
3. Optionally (for Win32 users), a utility that can map webDAV drives to a physical drive letter. I use Webdrive.
For those of us who don't want to RTFA, (in no particular order):
10) Bendable Concrete
9) PRAM (Phase-Change Random Access Memory)
8) Printed Solar Panels
7) Passport Hacking
6) Vehicle Infrastructure Integration
5) Body Area Network
4) Plasma Arc Gasification
3) VoN (Video on the Net)
2) Smart Pills
1) Data Cloud
I guess when #3 comes about, we will be living in the "VoN Age"?
Nuclear is increasingly the only quickly viable alternative to fossil fuel generation of power. I'd encourage all to read the article its a very interesting breakdown of possible energy generation sources.
What's the cost of your electricity in 20 years? Oh, you have no idea? Correct. So how do you know whether or not it's cost effective?
When you can show the lads-point to a link-with your local electricity supplier that offers a 20 year pricing contract, then you can make such a statement. Until then, you have absolutely no data to assert your assumption and cult-like belief system, ie, it's time to dump "junk economic science".
Now, I can't assert anything either, but I can say that solar bought today has a verifiable fixed price, you can get ten year warranties on batteries and 20-30 years on panels, and odds are the normal electric bill will always be going up in cost,by the charged kilowatt hour. See, I admit I don't actually know, but run the odds around in your brain, do you really believe it is going to be either exactly the same as you pay now or actually get cheaper from your local electrico? Or do you think "energy" in all its forms will just be rising dramatically in cost?
Now I read a lot of energy news, and I'll tell you this, you ain't seen nuthin yet like the demands coming from the developing world within the next decade, and, if it is fuel derived-any brand fuel-costs are going to be going up, from sheer market pressures. There just slap doesn't exist the reserves in the next 20 years to fit that demand coming, especially from reserves that are already gone now, and even nuclear power has never been any way close to being as cheap as they always claimed, in fact, just check the rates anyplace where it is used extensively now, barely better cost-wise than coal, and actually more expensive than natural gas.
Solar is our only practical fusion power, something that joe sixpack to joe big company can actually get their hands on and *use*, and it will be that way for decades to come. Coal has giant environmental and health impacts, which if you add those into what electricity costs, would probably double it right today, just like if you add in what having to have some huge military keep the oil flowing from ovewrseas (and that barely) really means your gallon of gas is a lot higher, they just hide it with more junk economic science and astroturfing FUD..
We just don't have a lot more in the way of practical, deployable options right now,solar and wind power are at the top of the "we got it-let's use it" pile of the alternatives, so the sooner we start adopting, the faster we can get economies of scale going. Waiting until it is cheap enough by some vague junk economic science forumla is the same as waiting for cars to achieve 250 MPG before you buy one, you'll be a pedestrian for a long long time. It's better to support what we have now, with our wallet voting, if we want that tech to get better in the future.
Now I will agree that "cheaper by the watt and who cares about the size" is a completely valid option,I would actually thow some cash at that (I have thrown cash at normal PV now) but here's something else-there's no law says you have to immediately go from grid suplied to totally solar powered in one step. You can start with just running a few things around your house, then work your way up as the tech gets better and more affordable. This way the solar companies make some money, keep doing research, more and better factories are built,stuff gets better, and etc.. That has worked with any number of other technologies, look at computers and just the last ten years for example, but the nice machines we have now with the much better pricing only happened because people bought computers on a large scale ten years ago.
We are part of the problem, or part of the solution, that's the only choices we have right now.
"Well, for the sake of argument, if you say that the solar panel is still worth what you originally paid for it 5 years ago"
The problem is that it is now worth a small fraction of what it was worth when you bought it. Just like a car (which also has about a 20 year lifespan), it loses value quite rapidly as it becomes less efficient and closer to being a pile of junk that you have to pay to get rid of.
Heck, it's hard to argue against buying solar panels now. If they pay for themselves in 5 years, as has been suggested upthread, and they have a functional lifespan of > 25 years, you could buy >25 years' worth of electricity for the price of 5 years' electricity. The only 'risks', really are: a) what if the price of electricity goes down? and b) what if the price of solar panels (cost:watt) goes down?
If solar panels paid for themselves in 6 months, I'd cover my whole roof with them, sell my cars and buy cars that can run on electricity, convert my gas furnace and hot water heater to run on electricity... and I'd give my oil, coal, and gas-burning brethren unending hell until they did the same. If solar panels were cheap enough to pay for themselves in 6 months, it would make sense for everybody to do it- not only for environmental reasons, but also for economical ones.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
My Grandfather was an expert on concrete, especially pre-stressed concrete. One of his party tricks was to show off a piece of thin, flat concrete, slightly larger than a standard ruler, then bend it in an arc.
He'd created this by stretching a thin wire with weights along a form, then pouring the concrete. Once the concrete was set, he removed the weights, which caused the wire to shrink, compressing the concrete and rendering it much more flexible.
Admittedly, they're actually talking about a different technology in the article, but they make it sound like no-one's ever made bendable concrete before.
|>
Here be Dragons